For the new Broadway musical “Big Fish,” Susan Stroman isn’t just the director and choreographer. She is also a rainmaker, leveraging her reputation as a five-time Tony Award winner for hits like “The Producers” and “Contact” to persuade investors to finance the $14 million show. She has talked up scores of potential backers at a dozen cocktail parties, dinners and receptions over the last two years, as well as at workshops and rehearsals. While she fields any and all questions, including oddball ones like her choice of lipstick for one actress, her primary role is to reassure.

Besides staging the show, of course.

“Broadway has become a huge gamble,” Ms. Stroman said, noting that 70 percent of shows lose money for investors. “But the fact is, I’ve done new musicals with big budgets, big casts and a lot of moving parts before. So I think I can actually help calm people’s nerves.”

If directors have always helped woo investors — Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse on name alone — their importance in firming up multimillion-dollar show budgets has grown in the last few years. Ms. Stroman didn’t need to nurture investors on “The Producers” in 2001, because there was so much money to go around, she said. But since the 2008 recession, financing tightened up, while production costs kept growing. To raise money for many musicals today, a star director is even more important than a star actor (unless he’s Hugh Jackman, that is).

The reason: Many Broadway shows now rely on checks from dozens of investors, instead of just a handful, and most of these backers look for signs that they won’t lose their shirts. For them, nothing beats having a Hollywood celebrity in the cast; Tom Hanks made it easy to raise $3.6 million to finance the Broadway play “Lucky Guy” last season. But most bankable stars from movies and television won’t do new musicals like “Big Fish” because they require years of development, a commitment of six months of performances or more, and a willingness to risk their images on unproven material.

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The director Susan Stroman, in black, at a rehearsal for “Big Fish”; its star, Norbert Leo Butz, is behind her in the gray shirt.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

That’s why top-tier directors like Ms. Stroman, Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) and Bartlett Sher (“South Pacific”) have become starry names in their own right. They have staged the rare Broadway shows that were moneymakers as well as Tony winners, the two biggest goals for most investors.

Frank Marshall, the Hollywood producer and director, decided to become a first-time Broadway investor with “Big Fish” in large part because of Ms. Stroman. “Stro is just extremely calm and confident in spite of so much riding on her shoulders,” Mr. Marshall said, using her nickname. With his friend Jimmy Buffett, the musician, they put in a six-figure sum into “Big Fish,” the story of a father (played by the two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz) who conjures up tall tales as a way to connect with his son (Bobby Steggert, a Tony nominee for “Ragtime”).

“At rehearsals, there was no panicking, no drama, no tense look on Stro’s face,” Mr. Marshall said. “It was all: Let’s make this a little better. It seemed like a happy family, which is what I want on movie sets, and that always comes from the top.”

Ms. Stroman has been in such demand that she is directing two new Broadway musicals this season, a rare feat. After “Big Fish,” which began performances on Thursday and opens on Oct. 6, she will direct and choreograph the springtime show “Bullets Over Broadway,” based on the 1994 film by Woody Allen. She was recruited for “Bullets” by Mr. Allen, who said in an interview that he had been pressed for years by producers to turn “Bullets” and another of his movies, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” into Broadway musicals.

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Norbert Leo Butz on the set of “Big Fish” in Chicago.Credit
Paul Kolnik

“I wanted someone I could feel confident about to hand it over to,” Mr. Allen said. “Everyone described her as a pro and a pleasure. And she has been. I feel better with her there, and I think the backers do, too.”

Ms. Stroman’s shows are known for adventurous choreography that draws on many styles of dance, like one “Big Fish” number that blends stomp, clogging and flat-footing. She develops movement that fits her performers, like comic bits in sync with Matthew Broderick’s nervous energy in “The Producers.” The polish is high and the innovations are plentiful, like her inventive use of props — from the tin roofing and miners’ picks in the 1992 musical “Crazy for You” to the chairs that became a boxcar and a jail cell in the 2010 show “The Scottsboro Boys.”

Even box office failures don’t seem to have hurt Ms. Stroman with investors. The 2001 Broadway musical “Thou Shalt Not,” her follow-up to “The Producers,” was panned and closed in three months. (The show, about a murder victim haunting his killer, was surely not helped by performances starting two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.) In 2007 came “Young Frankenstein,” with Ms. Stroman again teaming up with Mel Brooks of “Producers” fame; it drew bad reviews and closed in 15 months. Critics also panned her collaboration with Harold Prince on the 2010 London musical “Paradise Found,” and more recently the two have been unable to attract enough investors for Mr. Prince’s new musical “Prince of Broadway,” which had been announced for New York but is now aiming for Tokyo in 2015.

“The Scottsboro Boys,” her last outing on Broadway, earned 12 Tony nominations (including for Ms. Stroman’s direction and choreography) but won none and didn’t earn back its capitalization.

But on Broadway, you can have several flops and still be golden if you have that one big hit, like “The Producers,” which grossed about $290 million. And Ms. Stroman has more than that: two Tonys for “The Producers” as well as for choreographing the long-running hits “Contact,” the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” and “Crazy for You.”

Roy Furman, a veteran Broadway producer, recalled that he was initially skeptical about adapting “Big Fish,” a 2003 Tim Burton movie with highly cinematic fantasy sequences, into a stage musical. He became impressed with the musical’s lead producer, Dan Jinks, who produced the “Big Fish” movie and was an Oscar winner for “American Beauty,” as well as with the songs by Andrew Lippa (“The Addams Family”) and design ideas of Julian Crouch. But it was Ms. Stroman’s involvement that proved decisive.

“You need a strong visualizer for a show that is a romance and a comedy, who can balance highly theatrical production numbers with intimate father-son scenes,” Mr. Furman said. “Not many directors can pull that off with an even-keeled temperament. But Stro can. She did on ‘The Producers’ and other shows. If she was not there, I could love Dan Jinks, but I probably wouldn’t be in the show” as an investor.

Mr. Jinks described Ms. Stroman as essential to raising money, especially given that he was a first-time Broadway producer with limited connections in theater circles.

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Susan Stroman with Zachary Unger, who plays the son in "Big Fish."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Her involvement said to the theater community that this was a show worth paying attention to,” said Mr. Jinks, who is the lead producer with Bruce Cohen, his partner as well on the “Big Fish” movie.

He declined to estimate the number of investors who signed on because of Ms. Stroman, and noted, as did Mr. Furman, that investors ideally want “a whole package” that includes a strong director, creative team and stars.

Here, too, having Ms. Stroman helped, by attracting other talent.

Mr. Butz, a musical comedy star who won Tonys for “Catch Me if You Can” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” got his first big break — and a Tony nomination — on Ms. Stroman’s “Thou Shalt Not” and reveres her so much that he quickly signed up when she called about “Big Fish.”

“Stro likes to really exploit the way I move, which no one had done before ‘Thou Shalt Not,’ and she choreographs really specifically for my body in a way that makes me feel like an actual dancer,” Mr. Butz said.

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“The Producers” (with Matthew Broderick) attracted investors for “Big Fish,” which opens next month.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

At a “Big Fish” rehearsal last month, Ms. Stroman, in her signature all-black ensemble of blouse, leggings and boots, created a tap dance on the fly with Mr. Butz for one number, the two of them dancing together as the rest of the cast watched, A bit later, she and Mr. Butz developed a funny bit of stage business by having him slip under the covers with his son instead of standing beside his bed.

Asked if he would have joined “Big Fish” without Ms. Stroman, Mr. Butz said: “I don’t know. I do know I’m not sure I’d be performing with the same dynamism as now. I always wanted to work with Lippa, but I really wanted to work again with Stro again.”

Among other marquee directors, Mr. Sher is bringing “The Bridges of Madison County” to Broadway in the winter, and Mr. Mantello is directing the new Sting musical “The Last Ship,” which is aiming for Broadway in 2014. Jeffrey Richards, one of the lead producers of “Bridges of Madison County,” said that directors like Mr. Sher and Ms. Stroman were crucial to energizing investors to become involved in high-stakes productions like new musicals.

“Bart has shown himself to be the perfect director of romantic musicals,” Mr. Richards said, noting the director’s work on “The Light in the Piazza” and “South Pacific.” (Both starred Kelli O’Hara, as does “Bridges,” and she urged that Mr. Sher be hired as the director, Mr. Richards said.) “ ‘Bridges’ has big emotional flourishes, and our producers and investors know that Bart can make those happen.”

No director, of course, can guarantee that a “Bridges” or a “Big Fish” will soar. But investors and producers say they trust that a previously successful director can, at the very least, spot problems in a show and find ways to whip it into shape.

During the pre-Broadway tryout of “Big Fish” in Chicago in the spring, Ms. Stroman said, she came to believe that the first 15 minutes of the show weren’t working: The storytelling wasn’t clear enough, the emotional relationship between the father and son wasn’t strong enough, and the opening number wasn’t captivating audiences enough. So she and her team came up with a new start to the show over the summer and then staged it during rehearsals in New York. At one of those rehearsals, Mr. Jinks, the lead producer, watched carefully against a wall of mirrors as the 58-year-old Ms. Stroman kicked up her legs and clapped to the beat in tandem with cast members, Afterward, he pronounced himself delighted.

Ms. Stroman was harder to read, for she always seems to be smiling. But she, too, was happy.

“I think we have a new opening that captures the spirit of the character better, his lovability,” she said. “But it’s a work in progress until opening night. That’s something I tell investors. And I think they believe me.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 2013, on Page AR26 of the New York edition with the headline: Her Job Now Includes Reeling In Money. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe